Collaborative and distributed design process analysis for intelligent agents implementation

In the cooperative collaborative and distributed design process each agent must take the intent of the other agents into consideration for the efficient achievement of the overall goals of the design process. Hence, there is a pressing need for a pertinent multi-agent systems design. Or even stronger, further research is required on the modeling of distributed multidisciplinary design teams in design process. In this context, the interaction between the actors during the collaborative and distributed design process shows that this one is a key variable. The results ensuing from the interactions during design process must be consensual in order to be accepted. In this paper, we propose an approach for consensus recognition during the real interactions during the collaborative and distributed design process. For that, from real experiments, the process of cooperative and distributed design is analyzed. Then, based on this analysis, a formal model to represent the consensus is proposed. From the consensus recognition a typology of interactions during the cooperative and distributed design process is proposed. Based on the concept of consensus and its properties, the actors and intelligent agents can move towards consensus improvement or towards the ideal consensus. From a real application, the concept of consensus is used to evaluate the choice of a solution in terms of consensus and dilemmas; to assist the redesigning of a part or the whole solution according to consensual criteria's and to capitalize and share the know-how of the various actors.